1082 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
with knowledge, and with a most artistic nature ; but not a born 
novelist. She elaborated with painful slowness, and never possessed 
that self-confidence which marks writers like Trollopeand Thackeray. 
For these reasons she failed most completely as a poet. The English 
of her poems is faultless ; her lines are chiselled and polished, and 
the phrases are perfect ; but the soul itself is wanting. The most 
ennobling feature in her work is the spirit of responsibility in which 
she wrote, recognising that a writer of eminence holds a position 
of authority in trust for the nation. 
Another peculiar feature of the era is the widening of the literary 
field, Rider Haggard has done more to make South Africa known 
than all the geographers of the age ; Gilbert Parker is performing 
a similar work for Canada, writing as the friend and admirer of 
both English and French-Canadians ; Kipling has taken India as 
his province, and has lately so extended his range as to be hailed 
as the Poet Laureate of the Empire. 
There seem to be two forces at work in the present day, both 
tending to check the production of literary genius. One lies in the 
wonderful progress of science, and the rewards it offers to its 
votaries; the other arises from the universal education now 
dispensed throughout the English-speaking nations. We have it 
from Darwin himself, that a life spent in the pursuit of science 
deadens artistic aspirations, and tends to make invention and 
research the only pleasures. 
In the time of Addison the writer had to face the critics of the 
Clubs and Coffee-houses ; in Byron’s day his fame must withstand 
the onslaught of the writers of the critical reviews ; but in the 
present age the whole nation criticises, and literary factions belaud 
or berate each literary aspirant. A man of Goldsmith’s exquisite 
sensibility, who talked ridiculously under fear of his comrades’ 
coarse satire, yet wrote divinely when free and untrammelled in his 
own chamber, would probably have allowed his genius to die 
fruitless, rather than face the criticisms of an educated nation. 
No one now dare lay bare the heart as Charlotte Bronté did in 
“ Jane Eyre,” or paint his friends with all their blemishes as did 
Boswell in his “Life of Johnson.” Such writers would now be covered 
with ridicule. 
Under the twin influences of compulsory education and 
scientific invention, the Britain of to-day is no longer the field of 
romance it was to Defoe, Fielding, and Goldsmith. The bicycle, 
the railway-car, the newspaper, the telegraph, the better level of 
comfort, have banished romance to India, to the wilds of Africa, 
to the snows of Canada, to the shores of the Pacific. 
With the education of the labourer and artisan came a clearer 
conception of their position of inferiority in the world, and the 
many disadvantages inherent to that position. A period of 
social unrest set in, carrying with it a vague feeling of alarm to 
